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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23654890">Epistolary</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Robin_Fai/pseuds/Robin_Fai'>Robin_Fai</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Endeavour (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Coma, Dreams, Gen, Letters, Mystery, Never drink the tea, Whump, and no idea how to tag it, i don't know what this is</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 22:48:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,097</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23654890</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Robin_Fai/pseuds/Robin_Fai</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Once a year, he receives an impossible letter.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Epistolary</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Epistolary relates to the writing of letters, and is usually used in the context of either a literary work told through the medium of letters or documents, or a relationship through correspondence.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <b>1</b>
  </p>
</div>Once a year, he receives an impossible letter. Without fail, it arrives on his birthday. It has become the one constant in his life. No matter how many times he’s moved, it always finds him. He never knows how she gets his address. There’s no return address, and the postmarks are always different.<p>She always tells him to burn them. He’s kept every single one. Not that he needs to. He’s memorised almost everything they say. </p>
<p>She always says she loves him, but he doesn’t believe her. She wouldn’t have left him if she did.</p>
<p>Sometimes he keeps the letter for a few days before opening it. That way he can imagine it says something new. He imagines it contains her address, an offer to see him, something that would bring her back to him.</p>
<p>This year he slips the small envelope into the breast pocket of his jacket. He visualises it like a shield around his heart, although whether it’s protecting him from harm or love he couldn’t say.</p>
<p>No one else knows it’s his birthday. It’s in his file he supposes, but since he’s never made a thing of it before no one thinks to remember. His only card is from Joyce. He doesn’t know whether to see the letter he carries as a gift.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <b>2</b>
  </p>
</div>It was supposed to be a routine enquiry. He was only there to check an alibi. Yet, as so often happens, he stumbles into something more. However, this time he doesn’t realise it.<p>Perhaps he would have left unscathed, but as usual he asks all the wrong questions. They’re actually the right questions for the investigation of course, but not the ones he was supposed to ask, and definitely the ones that make her think he suspects her guilt.</p>
<p>Maybe on another day he would have noticed her edginess and the way she evades the simple queries he puts to her, but today he’s thinking of the paper in his pocket.</p>
<p>She offers him tea, and normally he’d refuse, but he hasn’t had anything since breakfast. He drinks the hot liquid down so fast he barely tastes it. She watches him drink with an unnerving intensity. He doesn’t get much chance to wonder why.</p>
<p>His throat feels scratchy. His voice doesn’t come out right. The room begins closing in on him. He wonders where the woman he was interviewing has gone. He needs to phone for help but his legs give out. </p>
<p>Lying on the floor, he realises what has happened, and wonders if what she gave him was fatal. With fingers growing numb he pulls out the envelope and tries to open it. His limbs won’t obey him  any more. He clutches the letter close and wishes, if he’s going to die, that he’d had a chance to read it.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <b>3</b>
  </p>
</div>He isn’t conscious when Thursday arrives and doesn’t hear the ambulance that follows soon after. He doesn’t feel Thursday carefully remove the letter from a hand that has seized tight, nor see the puzzled expression he wears as he looks at it.<p>His conscious mind retreats deep within his body. While the paramedics and then doctors struggle to keep him alive, he is wandering a huge library the size of the city. Here and there he takes a book down and reads it. Music fills the aisles. There’s grass beneath his feet, and a blue sky above.</p>
<p>If this is what it is to die, it isn’t so bad he reasons. </p>
<p>Days and nights become interchangeable. He begins to find the monotony of it all quite tedious. He’s always been lonely, but now he is utterly alone, and he longs to see another face. </p>
<p>He sometimes imagines he hears Thursday’s voice. He’s not sure if it’s a ghost of a memory, or if it’s real. If the voice is real then maybe he’s not dead after all.</p>
<p>Sometimes it feels as though someone is holding his hand, but there’s no one there.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <b>4</b>
  </p>
</div>One day/night/whenever he hears another voice. This one is familiar but he can’t place it. It makes him think of the letters, but that wouldn’t be possible.<p>His mother writes him the letters, but she can’t come to see him. </p>
<p>He began telling people she died because it’s easier than the truth. Either way he never gets to see her again. </p>
<p>The voice is persistent, begging, pleading for him to wake. He turns up the music that fills his mind but it can’t drown her out. If he is asleep then he’d be happy to wake, but he doesn’t know how. He closes his eyes and imagines opening them in the real world.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <b>5</b>
  </p>
</div>He opens his eyes and finds himself in a bright white space. The light hurts his eyes. Nothing will focus. He shuts them tightly again.<p>Voices that are too loud and touch that feels like sandpaper against his skin flow around him for some time. He can’t understand what they’re saying. Something bulky is pulled from his throat.</p>
<p>He tries to remember where he is, what happened, but nothing makes any sense. The last he knew it was his birthday. </p>
<p>Slowly the voices begin to make sense. Snippets of conversation drift about. He can’t keep a hold on them, but at least they no longer feel like hammer blows to his brain. </p>
<p>Snapshots of a grand library crowd his recent memory. He doesn’t understand.</p>
<p>He tries to open his eyes again a while later. This time he manages to discern the outline of people around him. They speak soothingly, softly touch his hand, and soon he is slipping back into a normal sleep.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <b>6</b>
  </p>
</div>His recovery is slow. They keep telling him it’ll take time. He has to re-learn to coordinate his movements. He’s been asleep for a month they tell him. He’s lucky to be alive.<p>The Inspector and Mrs Thursday visit most days. Sometimes he thinks they have something important to tell him, but he can only tell by the spaces in the conversation, the things that they talk around.</p>
<p>Then one day Thursday arrives with another woman. Her hair is long and golden-red, her features soft. She’s older than when he last saw her, but he’d know her anywhere. She holds in her hands the letter that he wore by his heart on that fateful day.</p>
<p>She smiles at him, a tentative, barely hopeful look. His mother’s smile is the other half of his own. She takes his hand, and for the first time in years he knows what it is to be home.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I honestly don't know what happened here. I was working on the end of Traces and Tracks and then this suddenly emerged fully formed. I think I've been listening to the wrong kind of music today. </p>
<p>Anyways, it's certainly an interesting idea having Morse's mother not really dead. I'm curious to know what the back story is there - because I don't know even though I wrote this. I thought I would find out, but they decided not to tell me. If you know, please do tell me. (Or tell everyone. It would be interesting if this spawned a real fic around that concept.)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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